Tile (2nd generation)

Tile is a Bluetooth gadget that helps you track and find things when they’re lost, just like the similar TrackR Bravo (see opposite).

We first heard about Tile way back in June 2013. It turned out to be a very successful crowdfunded project, raking in $2.5m from thousands of people wanting a way to keep track of their precious items.

Apparently in a life time, the average person spends about 153 days looking for misplaced possessions and valuables, and we all know you tend to realise you’ve lost something when you have the least amount of time to find it.

Price

Tile is finally officially available in the UK, so you no longer have to pay the $21 shipping charge from the US (almost as much as the $25 Tile).

This means you can buy a Tile from Amazon for £19.89. You can also buy the tracker from Tesco, we’re told, though it’s not listed online. If £20 sounds pricey, you can buy a pack of four from Amazon for £49.99 and split them with some friends and family. It will be available from other leading retailers across the UK from March.

Note the internal battery lasts about a year but is not replaceable, so the Tile is in effect a consumable: you replace it every 12 months.

Setup and use

The first thing you’ll notice is that it’s larger than you thought it would be. We did, at any rate. It’s not too big to attach to a key ring, but at around 5.5mm it’s twice the thickness of an average key and wider than most car key fobs.

Unlike at launch there’s now an Android app, which requires Android 4.4 or later. You can use a Tile with an iPhone or iPad has Bluetooth 4.0 or later.

The app is free, and there’s no subscription. It’s easy to pair the Tile: you press the ‘e’ and it plays a short tune to let you know it’s in pairing mode. You just find it in the list of available Bluetooth devices and tap on it.

Once paired, you’ll need to create a free account through the app. It then works much like the Find My iPhone app in that you can see when the Tile was last ‘seen’ – in other words, when it had Bluetooth contact with your iPhone or iPad – and a map of its location.

If you were to lose the object to which the Tile is attached, you can go to its last known location and start searching. Bluetooth 4.0 LE’s range is bigger than you might think at up to 150 feet, so you don’t have to be right on top of the Tile before the app can connect to it.

Until it’s in range, the app will show ‘Out of range’, but when it connects, a green Find button appears. This causes the tile to play a Donkey Kong-style tune, which is pretty loud. In a quiet house you’ll easily track it down, but it’s harder if you’ve lost it near a busy road.

It’s still not obvious in the current version of the app that you can tap the Tile icon inside the green circle to display a distance gauge showing whether it’s near or far. The segments fill up as you get closer to the tile, but there’s no indication which direction to go.

As we mentioned at the start, there’s a new feature in the secondgeneration version: find my phone. This is a bit more convenient than Apple and Google’s systems as you can press the ‘e’ on your Tile and your phone will play a loud tune even if it’s on silent. That saves you from having to log into the respective website or find another iOS device to track your missing one.

Returning to tracking capabilities, if you return to the place the Tile was last seen and you’re still out of range, there is another way to find it, but it relies on other Tile users. It’s called Community Find, and it’s a really clever system. Whenever the Tile app is running on anyone’s phone or tablet, it logs the location of any other Tiles that it detects.

You wouldn’t know that, as no information is shown apart from the location of your own Tiles (you can have up to eight of your own connected to the app). Everything is done anonymously.

Should another Tile owners lose theirs and your app picks up the location, this will be relayed to them